Next week in BizHive Weekly
When we talk about tourism in Sarawak, it is usually to experience our food, culture and natural resources. Today, the definition of tourism is expanding. Next week on BizHive Weekly, we dive into the growing local health and education tourism sectors to see how they’re faring and what trends we might be expecting in the near future: “Back in the day, we didn’t look at hospitals as a form of tourism but nowadays we do because we have begun to see a lot of foreign patients coming in from neighbouring countries. This is partly due to our advances in medical facilities state-side and our relatively low cost of treatment and living cost in Sarawak. While a lot of this income in this sector will go to private hospitals themselves, we still see similar positive impacts from this as we would from traditional tourism. “Education tourism or edu-tourism is another area which is also very thriving. In Sarawak we have quite a number of private universities sities and intuitions that provide education at primary, secondary ndin and tertiary levels. And in these intuitions, you can see ee that quite a large number of students are foreigners.” “We are now earmarking the college (NIIT College) to have more collaborations with other higher learning institutions from China under the one belt one road scheme Under this scheme, students have a chance to obtain scholarships from Chinese higher learning institutions and further their studies in China. Currently we have 11 students studyingg in Beijing under this scheme and we are hoping to sends more students this year. And from this collaboration, ration, we arare also looking to attract studestudents from China to come to KucKuching to study. I believe this area of education tourism is an area we can do momore one because Kuching Kuchi is still relatively tively cheap and safe compared com to other countries.” co